Ilegenes: Giyoku no Koukyoukyoku – bonutzuu’s manga archive

The title, Giyoku no Koukyoukyoku, is a mouthful, so I’ll refer to this is as Ilegenes: Symphony of the Illusory Wings. This manga is a direct sequel to Ilegenes: Kokuyou no Kiseki (the Path of Obsidian) and a prequel to the novel.

Ilegenes is a shoujo sci-fi/military manga. The events take place on an island called Ilegenes, famous for its advanced technology in genetic engineering. However, as with biology and its ethical nightmares, people try to use this technology for the wrong purposes, and that’s where our protagonist comes in.

Story

Fon Fortinbras Littenber was a third-year student in Ilegenes’s military academy and the leader of ‘Elfenbein’, an anti-government organization aiming to expose and get rid of corrupted politicians. Fon planned to run for dorm master of the academy, so that he could make the rules more relaxed, and he and his friends in Elfenbein would have more wiggle room to get out of the dorms and do their anti-government things.

Things were not easy, however, when two females joined the all-male military academy. One of them is Gabrielle “Gabby” Grey, who possessed the same ‘peacock eyes’ that Fon had.

Peacock eyes are symbols of the ‘purge children’, genetically engineered superhumans. Gabby came here to become to queen of Ilegenes, starting with taking over the academy, and so she had to get rid of Fon first. However, Fon could not do anything to her, because it is programmed into the purge children that older children cannot harm the newer ones. F comes before G, so Fon is older than Gabby, and he can’t do anything to harm her while Gabby had the rights to get rid of Fon if she deemed him defective.

Fon grew terrified of Gabby and did nothing as she slowly brainwashed those in the academy into becoming her loyal fans, assisted by her cousin, Karel. However, Fon still had his best buddy Jacques and his other friends in Elfenbein, and so he came to his senses and launched his dorm master election campaign against Gabby’s growing influence.

One day, a water pipe burst in Gabby’s room, and Jacques came to her rescue. After that, Gabby developed a crush on him. Karel grew worried, because it was a huge crack in Gabby’s ruthless and calm demeanor.

The day came for the presidential *cough* dorm master debate. Fon won back some of the students, and learned that Gabby may be a ‘fake’ purge children. To confirm, he turned on a song that could mess with purge children’s memories. Gabby had no reaction to it, but her cousin Karel did. It turned out that Karel is H or ‘Hamlet’, the final purge children created. He wore contact lenses to conceal his peacock eyes, or ‘Mayura eyes’, that could resonate with Fon’s own Mayura eyes. Gabby’s eyes were just regular peacock eyes.

Fon, Gabby, and Karel confronted the one behind the scenes: the person who created Gabby. After Gabby realized that she was just a puppet whose memories could be edited to suit her creator’s purposes, she killed him and got arrested, and disappeared from everyone’s lives.

Fon became the dorm master and head of the school. He’ll go on fighting corruption in Ilegenes alongside his friends.

Review

This installment of Ilegenes is basically one of those ‘fight for power over the school’ stories. I haven’t read the first Ilegenes manga because it went out of print in my country, but man, a lot of interesting stuff seemed to have happen in that manga, judging from the flashbacks in this sequel. Personally, I find the story of this second manga average. It was fun and well-paced, but it wasn’t a wow, if you know what I mean.

Elfenbein’s mission portrayed in this story was super exciting to read, but not so much the election campaigns. The main conflict is pretty much every sci-fi creator vs creation ever, and I’ve seen it way too many times. Ilegenes 2 tied up everything introduced in the story, but not those leftover from the first manga. I think those are saved for the novel.

By itself, it’s a good manga, but just not a ‘wow this is amazing’ manga. What would make this manga really good is if you considered it as part of a whole of the Ilegenes storyline. Fon grew from being that kid wanting to jump off a building into a proud leader in the first manga, then struggled with his identity crisis and got back up again in the second manga. And in the novel, he became pretty much everything he stood against in this manga. Gabby was all about absolute control and discipline, while Fon’s campaign focused on personal growth and camaraderie. However, in the novel, Fon would become Ilegenes’s supreme tyrant, and his best friend Jacques wasn’t even with him anymore.

To be honest, I really thought it was a BL manga when I turned the first few pages, but it wasn’t. The story focused more on bromance, and had a lot of scenes where Jacques and Fon developed trust for each other and supported each other in their worst moments. There are girls in this story, but one of them (Gabby) is basically female Fon and the other (Rosalind) is just comic relief.

The best thing about this manga was the art. Everybody looked really pretty, and I didn’t detect any lazy shots. The art was a big reason why I bought the manga, and also a big part of my enjoyment.

Overall, Ilegenes: Symphony of the Illusory Wings is a good manga with very pretty art, but it’s more of a supplement story for Ilegenes fans. It’s for enjoyment if you like pretty boys and school power struggles.